Five questions to consider when scaling for impact – podcast

Dr Neela Saldanha, Executive Director, Yale Research Initiative on Innovation & Scale (Y-RISE), visited Australia on the invitation of SVA to give the keynote address at our summit on impact at scale. She explained why successful pilots often don’t achieve the same results ‘at scale’ and provided questions to consider when expanding a change program.

Summary
  • Speaking at SVA’s summit on impact at scale, Dr Neela Saldanha said when we consider scaling up, we need to look beyond simply scaling the organisation.
  • Often it’s more important to scale the solution and to consider the barriers to an effective scale up.
  • However when scaling a pilot, there are five questions to ask: Will it work here in this new context? Could there be unintended consequences of scaling up? What’s the political calculus of scaling up? What if everyone does it? and What could be the implementation issues?
  • A case study of a Kenyan teacher expansion program illustrates a number of these issues.
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